Fly the friendly skies?

Oh gosh there were soooo many more satiricals and critiques on the web. You just need to do a search in Google and click on images tab.

Ok we will stop beating United.

The point of this quick post this evening is the spotlight on the frequent overbooking taking place. Many a reason had been pro-offered for doing so. Yes we know in this incident the flight was actually NOT overbooked according to latest reports. But we are not specifically discussing about this occurrence.

You recall we had dumb travel luck right? Again it was due to overbooking. So this is not the sole domain of airlines in the west. The issue at hand was how the overbooking was managed.

Wouldn’t it had been the procedure to prevent passengers from checking into the flight instead of removing them from one? That is, if the flight was truly overbooked, or in this case a few seats were required to transport airline staff. Whatever the reasons. Did the requirement to send staff came last minute? That last minute? Wow.

Some folks haved call this Brand suicide for the airline.

We think they’d not likely be the only one. Just the first in a line of ill(ustrious ) airlines to be caught with its pants down. If you were ‘chosen’ to be removed from a flight after you had checked-in and properly seated in the aircraft, what would your reaction be?

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Author: Mel & Suan

Mel works his day job for a living, but lives for antiquities, history and geography at all other times. He enjoys writing and thought sharing and obviously traveling.
Suan is a homey person, who like girlie stuff such as cross stitching etc. Enjoys shopping & modeling for Mel. What a match!
View all posts by Mel & Suan

It was just handled horribly. Even if the passenger didn’t want to disembark, no one deserves to be dragged like that! That’s just inhumane. You can’t even do that to animals or the activists will prosecute you. We’re talking about a human being here, a paying human being. I definitely won’t fly United ‘coz I’ll never know. Don’t let people go through the boarding process and then ask for volunteers. We did once in Manila and Emirates booked us at the best 5-star hotel in Makati, flew us business on the Manila-Dubai sector and gave us free return tickets for the same sectors to travel within a year! It was awesome. That’s how you handle overbooking. Bad United, bad!

People’s desire to spend less rules the game, sadly. My cynical self would say then that people deserve what happens if they allow corporates to treat them like that. So much like our political arena. There are other airlines, use them. We’re lucky monopoly isn’t prevalent anymore.

That is so true! I forget that. I was just at a shoe store and the owner of Aldo (distributorship) in SA is also the owner of Steve Madden and other shoe brands. Not so much competition for them although for the brand.

That’s right. We have to examine the shareholding behind these brands and companies. They don’t need to hold large portions like say 50%. All they need is 30% or something like that to control the companies. Someone traced the ownerships and it seems like a very small group owns a lot of the largest firms in the world!

This story is just insane and is absolutely everywhere!! Am loving the comical sketches and impromptu adverts for United that have been popping up online but I don’t think I’d find it funny if the same thing happened to me! All this should have been regulated BEFORE BOARDING! United are gonna pay dearly for this mess

Indeed. There are a couple of other incidents surfacing as well if you look it up. Someone’s got stung by a scorpion, a granny was “forced” off her business class seat. Now we don’t know if any of that is fake news, but when there’s momentum it simply builds! That’s the nature of social media and journalism these days…

I’d be irritated as heck, Suan. Maybe ten free flights to anywhere I wanted to go my calm my temper. But there was no excuse for United’s behavior. I am pretty sure the airline will pay in lost bookings. It certainly won’t see me for a long time. –Curt

I think overbooking is rather common for airlines. Overbooking happened to me several times, and Emirate, for example, swiftly “dragged” me to Business Class… where I could not resist 🙂 I think that is the way to treat your customers. Even if they cannot upgrade the poor man, they have to to find another way to bring him home. I have read somewhere that his destination is just around 300 miles away from Chicago, so they can rent a car for him. It must cost less than the mess they created. And we cannot deny the fact that they target foreigners, Asian to be more specific (both the doctor and his wife were chosen) because we usually avoid conflict and don’t complain. Bad choice! I have not been in America but I know an airline is on my blacklist 🙂

Well, to be fair the airline did choose others too. So we aren’t sure and would not believe any form of prejudice was exercised. It was poorly executed though to pull a passenger from the seat after one had completed all the due process.

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